Website History

The Northern California Bluegrass Society website is the oldest bluegrass organization website on the internet and the oldest continuously-served bluegrass music website of any type. It has been on the web since March, 1994.

Former SCBS/NCBS member Bob Cherry had bluegrass content up when he was testing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Ethernet Test Bed project at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1980’s….the very first bluegrass website. The testing he did lasted approximately two years. About a decade later, he went live with the bluegrass website Cybergrass (from Colorado Springs, CO.) in February, 1994. Cybergrass (the “Internet Bluegrass Magazine”), the oldest bluegrass website, was served continuously until 2002, and returned to service in 2003 after about a year’s hiatus.

The NCBS website (then, the SCBS website) went live in March, 1994, one month after Cybergrass.

Michael Hall attended an International Bluegrass Music Association panel in Fall 1993 and came home insisting that SCBS find a way to publish on the web. SCBS went live about 6 months later with a site on member Don Steiny’s website Infopoint. It originally contained membership, radio listings, and calendar info. In 1995, Michael Hall and Don Steiny from SCBS and Bob Cherry from Cybergrass were on an IBMA panel on using the internet to promote bluegrass.

This website was replaced in 1997, when Barb Hansen set up the new SCBS website at “scbs.org” and Don Steiny put a pointer from Infopoint to the new site. Under Barb Hansen’s direction, the upgraded site contained a vast amount of information about the Society and about bluegrass in Northern California.

In 1999, the Santa Cruz Bluegrass Society changed its name to the Northern California Bluegrass Society and immediately sought to register “ncbs.org,” but the National Caged Bird Show got it one week before NCBS.
NCBS then registered “bluegrasssociety.org .” Gary Mansperger took over as NCBS webmaster in 2004, and he and Michael Hall participated in a 2004 IBMA panel on bluegrass print and web publication.